Virtualization data protection and management solutions specialist Vizioncore, a subsidiary of Quest Software, announced the release of Quest Management Pack for VMware, a free management pack on that extends Microsoft System Center Operations Manager to monitor VMware virtual infrastructure. The solution offers free community support with paid product support as an option.

By standardizing on Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the end-to-end centralized monitoring framework for physical and virtual IT environments, organizations have been able to significantly reduce overall management costs, the company explained. Quest Management Pack for VMware simply extends this centralized monitoring into VMware virtual infrastructures, offering the ability to detect, diagnose and resolve problems affecting the performance and availability of the IT infrastructure.

Dick Csaplar, senior research analyst for virtualization and storage at Aberdeen Group, said their research shows that most organizations with server virtualization have used VMware hypervisors running on Windows-based servers. "Vizioncore is filling a very large gap between two major players in virtualization," he said. "With the Quest Management Pack for VMware, capturing and reporting VMware performance and availability information allows users of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager to get the entire picture of their virtualized environment."
Quest Management Pack for VMware is offered by Vizioncore as a freeware solution with optional paid support. Support pricing includes both 1-year and 3-year options, set at $99 per socket and $238 per socket, respectively. Steve Stover, senior director, product management, at Vizioncore, explained for the organizations that utilize Microsoft System Center Operations Manager as their primary monitoring framework, extending support to VMware virtual infrastructures makes Quest Management pack for VMware a vital offering.
Stover said a process of low overhead collection has enabled the Quest Management Pack for VMware to ensure minimal contention between monitoring and critical workloads that run in the monitoring system, enabling Vizioncore to extend support to VMware virtual infrastructures. "We are able to offer for free what many vendors would be charging for, enabling administrators managing virtual infrastructures to simply download this management pack and immediately wrap value around it for the benefit of their organizations," he said.

Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.